Girl on Film

Such Is Our Fate: “Dark Souls 2” and the Loss of Self

“Sometimes I feel obsessed with this insignificant thing called “self”. But even so, I am compelled to preserve it. Am I wrong to feel so? Surely, you’d do the same in my shoes? Maybe we’re all cursed from the moment we’re born.”

When I was a child, my family would take an arduous twenty-hour road trip to Miami every year to see my family for the holiday season. It was the same trip burned into my brain every time: the boring landscapes of south Illinois, the sunset cresting over the mountains in Tennessee, the crowded skyline and labyrinthine highways of downtown Atlanta. But it always ended in Aventura, Florida, a mecca of high-rise beachside apartments and delicious Cuban food that seemed like a foreign kingdom to a little girl from Missouri. We spent every Christmas with my grandparents, who we affectionately referred to as “abuelito” and “abuelita”, crafting timeless memories in their apartment some twenty floors above the city.

I remember the last time I saw my “abuelita” before she died. Dementia was robbing her of everything: her memories, her abilities, even the English she had learned when she moved to the mainland United States. We only spent one afternoon now visiting them, the only time she was supposedly in “good enough” condition for visitors. The beautiful 80s decor high-rise apartment had to be replaced with an indistinct home in a suburb near a hospital for her benefit. When we arrived it was immediately clear she had no clue who we were, her brain having receded to a time before we existed in her life. I didn’t know how real dementia was until I saw the emptiness in her eyes and knew that this was a fate that might befall all of us someday.

Everything that day felt so wrong – the trip to my grandparents’ place was not the one that I’d known like the back of my hand, the destination was replaced with a house I’d never seen before or since, and the person we’d had such a deep and intimate connection to for years had no idea who we were.

All I fear is one day I’ll forget it all too.

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Outcasts Without a Home: “Agony of a Dying MMO” and the Old Internet

CW: Descriptions of suicide, sexual violence; references to racism, sexism, transphobia, mass shootings, mental illness

People will always point to various moments in history as the cause to what “changed the internet”.

Some will say maybe September 1993, when AOL began offering Usenet access to all of their subscribers. Usenet was something of a prototype forum service, a nesting ground for technological savants who developed some of the most important advancements in the early internet while also engaging in the exact type of disgusting bullshit you’d expect from late 80s/early 90s tech culture. As former user and professor of computer science at Purdue University Gene Spafford once said:

“Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.”

And if that isn’t a good explanation of the old internet, than I don’t know what is.

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Welcome to Friend Island: “Love Island US Season 3” and the Gaping Sores of America

So I foolishly thought that in the new year of 2021, the world would be in a better place than it was the previous year. After all, we were coming out of the “worst” of the most horrifying pandemic of the past century, a middling presidency that at that point served only a wealth of TV soundbites and less actual damage to the political system, and we were looking forward to a brighter future and a return to what some hoped would be “normal”. The past was the past, and this was going to be a new moment.

Oh how naïve we all were.

As of this writing Covid-19 cases are hitting staggering new highs in the southern US, with Florida (of course) somehow hitting a record amount despite vaccines being easily available in the country for months. The death rates are at almost the same as last year. The middling disaster of the 45th president had one more trick up its sleeve, a firebomb brewing for dozens of years that went off in one of the most embarrassing fiascos of American political history. Misinformation has already implanted itself so thoroughly among half the country that people would rather die than admit they were wrong; the spread of such chaos being happily spat out through the algorithms of corporations only intent on raking in dollar signs. All the potential benefits that could have come from this once-in-a-lifetime moment are being briskly swept away: offices demanding their employees come back, no respect given to science and healthcare workers, the country’s clearly weak infrastructure forced right back into action as if we didn’t just see its gaping holes. The earth is dying and the people who actually have the resources do something about it instead have kickstarted a capitalist space race.

2021 has gone to show that old, toxic habits die hard.

Sigh.

Yeah, I watched Love Island again.

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Finding Humanity in Inhumanity: “The Last of Us Part II”

CW: Descriptions of Graphic Violence, Transphobia, Homophobia

Spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2

I’m just going to start at the end, if you don’t mind.

One of the final moments in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II consists of two flashbacks to a pivotal night in the life of Ellie, a young woman living in a remote town during the (fungal) zombie apocalypse. You wouldn’t know the state of the world outside from the scene on display though: a mountain lodge ballroom, full of dangling lights and jovial music, people dancing and having a good time.

Ellie sits alone, an introvert sipping on a drink, conversing with her friend Jesse. While he talks, she looks across the ballroom to see a woman, Jesse’s ex Dina, smiling and dancing, not a care in the world. Ellie grins sheepishly, averting her eyes when Dina looks back, shy in a way that only makes the intention more obvious.

Dina comes by, takes her hand, and whisks her away to the center of the room for a slow dance. They hold each other, flirt adorably, stare deeply in each others’ eyes.

The passion is vibrant; they kiss in the middle of the floor.

Later that night, Ellie finally confronts her surrogate father of sorts, Joel Miller, after years of tension. To say they have a strained relationship is putting it mildly. Ostensibly, she’s angry about how he once again tried to play protector and get in the way of her and a bigoted man who called her and Dina a slur after seeing them kiss.

But this is a confrontation years in the making, a lifetime of terrible mistakes that Joel has made that he will never acknowledge as wrong. Ellie can never forgive him for what he did, but she admits that she would like to try, to finally attempt to forgive and move on. Her father figure smiles with tears in his eyes, a line of hope for them to finally reconnect. They say their goodbyes for the night, looking forward to tomorrow.

This is the last conversation Ellie will ever have with her father.

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Happy Hour: A Recovering Alcoholic’s Thoughts on 2020 (and also “Another Round”)

CW: Alcoholism, Self-harm, Depression

I think at this point we can all agree that 2020 was a pretty rough fucking year. A viral outbreak the likes of which hasn’t been seen since a century ago raptured the world, with millions dead due to the ineptitude or sheer ignorance of those that we trusted to vote into office. Society ground to a halt, mental health crises skyrocketed, and dangerous conspiratorial ideology spread like wildfire. And tying up that year’s loose ends isn’t exactly looking promising either: vaccine rollout is held back by greedy corporations and uneducated populace, whatever economic recovery seems like a band-aid for a future plunge, and the ousting of America’s worst modern president began with childish denial, spiraled into the most pathetic attempt at insurrection ever seen, and ended with a quiet whimper as he skirted off to some distant tropical golf course, leaving a cult of brainwashed followers with their ass exposed and plunging further into insanity. As far as years go, it certainly wasn’t a great one.

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